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Toward the end of Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins’ Time-Based Art Festival performance Horizon, something clicked. Eurythmics’ “Love is a Stranger” swelled from the warehouse speakers at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art as Holt scooted across the stage, hidden beneath a hollow sculpture of a boulder. (Imagine a rock crawling across the ground in slow-motion.) She tugged at a metallic space blanket, revealing Lutz-Higgins curled beneath.
The scene brought the ever-shifting work into focus. It felt earthy yet synthetic, high-gloss yet grounded in tenderness. Eurythmics’ lyrics echoed like a secret thesis statement: “And I want you so/It’s an obsession…”
Horizon was a performance obsessed with transformation. Directed by local dance artist Holt in collaboration with Lutz-Higgins, the piece was a collective effort: Costumer Kim Smith Claudel sewed the dancers’ airy, neon orange-accented outfits, and dramaturg Kate Bredeson (a Reed College theater professor) helped shape the work’s conceptual terrain. Horizon’s porosity manifested in motion and material. Rocks, it turned out, weren’t just rocks, but symbols of change.
The performance opened with Holt and Lutz-Higgins at rest atop artist Jess Perlitz’s boulder sculptures. Composer Luke Wyland’s live ambient soundscape emerged from gentle field recordings layered over a glassy synth drone. Lapping waves and wind chimes mingled with the rustle of the audience settling. Holt and Lutz-Higgins peeled themselves from the boulders and stumbled onto the stage, like newborns learning the terrain for the first time.
Energetic and glistening, the dancers then mirrored each others’ movements in loose, spiraling phrases. Spotlit by lighting designers Al Knight Blaine and James Mapes, their long shadows stretched across the warehouse walls. They smiled naturally and often, the expressions more open and tender than what one might expect from dancers engaged in intricate technique. Midway through, Holt and Lutz-Higgins’ seated embrace—arms and legs entwined, chins against each other’s shoulders—felt sacred.
Throughout the performance, Perlitz’s rock sculptures acted as choreography partners and shelters, reminding me of wombs or cocoons. Textured like concrete, the forms were surprisingly hollow, light enough for Holt and Lutz-Higgins to lift, roll, and hide inside. Holt revealed a shiny, crumpled space blanket from within one form and used it to send watery shadows dancing across the walls.
Later, Wyland’s twinkling score faded into silence. All that remained was a single spotlight and the sound of the dancers’ breath, their limbs swinging in unison, arms slapping against torsos. Then, Holt and Lutz-Higgins climbed atop their rocks again. I looked at the pair balancing on the forms and thought of stones forming over millennia.
In Horizon, Holt and Lutz-Higgins moved with a caring attentiveness, echoing each other’s gestures and resting in a long hug. These choices suggested a willingness to change in response to someone else. Their horizon wasn’t a fixed point in space, but something more observant, responsive, and constantly in flux.
That intentionality made their choice to use “Love Is a Stranger” interesting and more than a little funny. Its glossy synth-pop broke from the work’s terrestrial quality, pointing toward the porous nature of the whole piece. Horizon refused to hold a single tone or meaning.
As “Love is a Stranger” faded, Holt and Lutz-Higgins once more pulled focus toward the most basic elements of the work: light, breath, and body. I recognized these as core materials of presence. Maybe one takeaway from Horizon was that the most transformative things rarely announce themselves; they’re already here.
Can’t get enough TBA 2025? Read our review of San Cha’s Inebria me.
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Lindsay Costello
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